He pointed out some uncomfortable parallels with America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“There are people in the way and those people have to be moved or have to be killed,” he said.

“It is stunning to watch millions of Americans go and pack theaters and cheer for a movie in which those foreigners, those resisters, those equivalents of the American Indians or the Iraqi resistance or Afghan resistance, are made into the heroes and the US mercenaries and the US soldiers are made into the villains,” Swanson said. “It is an incredible reversal.”

“For one thing, Iraqis are not 12 feet tall and blue with pointed ears,” joked Swanson. “But this is a story about American military force at the bidding of a corporation interested in a natural resource that is under someone else’s ground, going and trying to win the hearts and minds in a rather ham-handed manner and failing, and trying to use brute force to drive people out.”

“We have killed hundreds of thousands, almost certainly over a million Iraqis,” he added. “We have driven millions of Iraqis out of their nation, and we have done this in a place very rich in natural resources, which was among the motivations for going in there.”